Freezing Cold Snap

The Powers That Be in the weather department have forgotten this is southeast Texas..... it went down to freezing last night. Much too cold to let the cats sleep out on the screen-porch, so I kept all three of them inside. It was an interesting night.

AngelBoy curled up near the foot of the bed, between me and my husband. ShadowBaby curled up on the other side of me, near the edge of the bed. Mickey Kitty had fallen asleep in one of the chairs in the TV room, so we just left him there when we went to bed. Both AngelBoy and ShadowBaby didn't move the whole night, which meant that I was boxed in and couldn't move either. I fell asleep on my back and when I got up this morning, my hair didn't even look as if I'd turned over once. My hair looks as good as it did yesterday, so I didn't even bother to wash it this morning. The first cat to wake up was ShadowBaby, at his usual 4:30 in the morning. I have no idea why that cat wakes up at that hour, but he's done that for as long as we've had him. You could set your watch by that cat, if you wanted to wake up at 4:30 a.m.

Once the other cats heard ShadowBaby get up, they thought it was time to start their day and that's what they did. I got out of bed to see if it was still freezing outside, which it was. I left the window open a little bit so they could crawl out into the screen-porch from the breakfast room, and I went back to bed. Before I got back into bed, both ShadowBaby and AngelBoy had gone out on the porch to use the litter boxes out there. They have boxes in the house, so I don't know why they wanted to freeze their little kitty-tushes out on the porch.

Pretty soon after I went back to bed, AngelBoy and ShadowBaby came back up on the bed also. I was trying to stay awake, listening for any sounds of Mickey Kitty getting into something he shouldn't be touching, but I fell back to sleep. When I walked into the living room this morning, Mickey had taken some paper napkins from the kitchen and arranged them on the tile floor of the breakfast room. He also took the smallest wooden Christmas Nutcracker from my display in the living room and left it underneath the piano bench. Considering all the glass ornaments on the vintage aluminum tree in there, the little Nutcracker was the best thing he could've chosen to play with. When my husband went into the foyer to put his shoes on to walk Gracie this morning, he saw that Mickey had left one of his catnip toys in his shoe. A little early-morning gift from the baby-cat.

The temperatures this week will continue to rise and get back to normal. It's supposed to be near 80 degrees by Thanksgiving, and will stay warm throughout the weekend and into next week. Yeeee-haaaaw to that........... I hate these cold snaps.

My husband and I went grocery shopping yesterday, to get everything we needed for Thanksgiving dinner. We went to HEB instead of Kroger, and I figured out why I don't like to shop in that HEB anymore. The HEB is in a big shopping center with lots of stores, which makes for a very huge and crowded parking lot. I used to always shop at HEB when they were in a much smaller store, but then they moved to a bigger location and changed the whole floor plan of the store--- a very non-intuitive layout, as my husband calls it. But that's not why I began to hate shopping there. The music they play is more like rap than real music, their loud-speakers are always giving you the latest things on sale at the deli counter or at the in-store bakery, they always have the aisles blocked with employees stacking shelves, and the mood in there is downright frantic. By the time you're walking out of that store with your groceries, your nerves are just plain shot.

In contrast, shopping at the Kroger store that's near us is just the opposite. Kroger is in a small neighborhood shopping center--- only a few stores, without a mega-parking lot that you can lose your car in if you're not paying attention where you parked. The layout of the store is better and more convenient, and the aisles aren't obstacle courses with piled-up boxes and employees stocking shelves when the store is busy. The music is nicer (you can actually understand the lyrics), and there are no loud-speakers telling you that mesquite-smoked turkey is on sale for $3.00 a pound and fresh-baked tortillas will be ready in twenty-eight seconds, So y'all better get 'em while they're hot-hot-hot!! When you get your cart to the checkout counter in a Kroger, you don't have to unload everything because the cashier does that for you. And their sackers are mostly adults, not young kids who haven't learned yet not to put containers of apple cider on top of a carton of eggs. Best of all, when you leave Kroger, you don't feel like you've got to decompress before you can drive home.

I'm waiting for Miss C this morning... she'll be here in a little while to help me with the pies for Thanksgiving. I'm going to try something different with the pumpkin pie-- sprinkling the bottom crust with crushed pecans or cashews, or maybe a mixture of both. I thought the nuts would give a little texture to the pie and make the crust more interesting. For the apple pie, I have a recipe that I got out of a cookbook nearly thirty years ago and I've used ever since...... calls for using Yellow Delicious apples, with brown sugar instead of white sugar, and you pile those apples up as high as you can so you have a very thick pie after it's baked.

Needless to say, we'll have a lot of delicious food for Thanksgiving, we'll have good company, and we'll have warm and sunny weather. Lots to be thankful for in our home.